by Lori Jackson

Created on: March 28, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

So this is the brutal truth as I see it: a career can only compromise our family life if we choose to allow our career to compromise our family life. You see, life is all about choices - we make them even when we don't realize we're making them.

What may appear, on the surface, as the "reality" of our life and career and family is really only the result of choices we've made in the past.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. So why does it seem some people thrive and others are caught in a perpetual state of "not enough" that affects every loved one in their inner circle?

Not enough quality time.

Not enough money.

Not enough joy or fun or recreation.

Our family came face-to-face with this truth when our son, who is now 4 years old, was a newborn and wrestling with some health issues. At that time, my husband was an up and coming manager with a major US retailer and working all the time.

Literally.

In fact, our breaking point was a month-long stretch of John putting in 18 hour days, every single day. I was miserable. He was miserable. And you know what that means - our kids were miserable.

Somehow, call it a miracle, we had a brief moment of clarity and realized we were not really a victim of our circumstances as we had come to believe, but that really we were simply on autopilot and had stopped seeing the consequences of our choices as just that. Choices.

For us, the solution was opening our own business.

Now, that may not be a scary proposition for some, but for us it took a huge leap of faith. But this is the bottom line: we were willing to risk massive failure in order to regain our family life.

But something happened in that decision to seize control of our own life. We realized the power we each have to really design and create the lifestyle of our dreams. For us, we started with a very simple exercise: what would our ideal day look like? Now, admittedly, my first run at this was very dry and uninspiring. It went something like this:

My laundry is all done. The bills are all paid. My house is clean. Blah, blah, blah. In that I realized that somewhere along the way I'd lost my dreams.

Where was the cool stuff like writing that novel or learning to speak French or taking up oil painting or delivering meals to the homebound or building a house in Mexico?

So then I worked backwards. When I lay my head down at night, what does the day look like where I go to bed feeling alive and joyful and fulfilled?

Ahhh, that was the key for us. The dreams began to emerge. Our priorities

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